Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Whew. First chance to actually sit down and reflect on the weekend since got home yesterday evening.

We had a lovely time in Belfast, mainly thanks to the hordes of lovely folk we got to have a sit and a chat with, or a meal or a pint. The actual panels and official events turned out to be less productive in terns of laughs per minute, but then isn't that always the way at cons? We met everyone on Friday night for the opening ceremony, and then the quiz. I soon realized that i have no knowledge whatsoever of science fiction. this was a bit of a blow, but luckily neither did my team mates. Myself and the other four members of the team managed to come bottom of all, which earned us the booby prize. Just goes to show if you are going to fail, fail spectacularly well! We managed not to have hangovers on Saturday, despite drinking copious amounts of Guinness, and were there bright and early for the con. We went to see the Parodies in SF panel, which ambled along nicely, and then grabbed a quick sit about and chat before our Writing Comics workshop with Catie Murphy and Paul Cornell. It was really interesting to see how they approached the whole thing, and we managed to witter on for quite a while, hopefully entertainingly in places.Padraig (center zombie) claimed his free pint (or mineral water in this case) from John (left zombie) for turning up in a " Reppion's zombie army" T-shirt.

We had a brief interlude before we had a panel on transferring comics to other mediums. I doubt we shed any fresh light on the whole subject, but nobody threw anything. We missed the guest of honor speech because we were all starving hungry, and went off to squeeze in a riotous lunch with P J Holden (right hand zombie above). We went to see the Doctor Who panel, and then Mr Padraig Ó Méalóid organized a meal at a Chinese restaurant. I had a really nice meal for saying I'm not usually fond of Chinese food, and we all trooped back to the bar for more beers and the casino night. I played Texas hold em for the first time and lost £2, but it was for charity so an excellent loss really. It was hard to stop my brain inserting excitable commentary in the style of late night poker shows on TV...which may have affected my play. We stumbled off to bed fairly early by convention standards and read Paul Cornell's Pete Wisdom trade paperback which we both enjoyed immensely. Sunday started with an almost barren crossovers panel, with the odd person filtering in from the coffee morning next door (filtering...coffee...is that a pun?). We all soon realized that there aren't that many crossovers in SCi Fi,and so we rambled around the subject for a while and then went off to the bar. we had such a lot of fun in th bar, john forgot to go to the web comics panel and we went to see the novel panel instead.

Iain Banks Alastair Reynolds and Catie Murphy were very entertaining and interesting all round. We had time to fit in a last bout of chatting before we took over the last panel of the day in a revolutionary fashion. We had been a bit disappointed by the the lack of guests on panels over the weekend (Paul Cornell did a whole panel by himself!)

and guests were left to basically organize their own convention. The guest of honor Iain Banks hadn't been put on any panels, neither had Ian McDonald, and we decided along with Paul Cornell and Catie Murphy to round as many guests and audience members up as we could and go and take over the "Dead Authors telling tales" panel. we decided it was an open question panel so you could ask anything you wanted of any of the guests. It unsurprisingly was a complete scream. everyone got their best anecdotes out, dusted off their favorite stories, and had a great giggle.

Catie Murphy, John and our surprised moderator!

Iain Banks, Alastair Reynolds, Ian McDonald

Paul Cornell enjoying the rebelliousness...

We managed to fit in a quick trot round the shops on Monday morning before the flight home. i slept through the turbulence, and could have slept all day long to be honest. why is talking so tiring?